Charles Dickens-Part 2 pot

* CHAPTER VII DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS* CHAPTER VIII THE TIME OF TRANSITION * CHAPTER IX LATER LIFE AND WORKS * CHAPTER X THE GREAT DICKENS CHARACTERS * CHAPTER XI ON THE ALLEGED OPTIMISM O

* CHAPTER VII DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS

* CHAPTER VIII THE TIME OF TRANSITION

* CHAPTER IX LATER LIFE AND WORKS

* CHAPTER X THE GREAT DICKENS CHARACTERS

* CHAPTER XI ON THE ALLEGED OPTIMISM OF DICKENS

* CHAPTER XII A NOTE ON THE FUTURE OF DICKENS

CHAPTER VII

DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS

In the July of 1844 Dickens went on an Italian tour, which he afterwards summarised in the book called

"Pictures from Italy." They are, of course, very vivacious, but there is no great need to insist on them

considered as Italian sketches; there is no need whatever to worry about them as a phase of the mind ofDickens when he travelled out of England He never travelled out of England There is no trace in all theseamusing pages that he really felt the great foreign things which lie in wait for us in the south of Europe, theLatin civilisation, the Catholic Church, the art of the centre, the endless end of Rome His travels are nottravels in Italy, but travels in Dickensland He sees amusing things; he describes them amusingly But hewould have seen things just as good in a street in Pimlico, and described them just as well Few things wereracier, even in his raciest novel, than his description of the marionette play of the death of Napoleon Nothingcould be more perfect than the figure of the doctor, which had something wrong with its wires, and hence

"hovered about the couch and delivered medical opinions in the air." Nothing could be better as a catching ofthe spirit of all popular drama than the colossal depravity of the wooden image of "Sir Uudson Low." Butthere is nothing Italian about it Dickens would have made just as good fun, indeed just the same fun, of aPunch and Judy show performing in Long Acre or Lincoln's Inn Fields

Dickens uttered just and sincere satire on Plornish and Podsnap; but Dickens was as English as any Podsnap

or any Plornish He had a hearty humanitarianism, and a hearty sense of justice to all nations so far as heunderstood it But that very kind of humanitarianism, that very kind of justice, were English He was theEnglishman of the type that made Free Trade, the most English of all things, since it was at once calculatingand optimistic He respected catacombs and gondolas, but that very respect was English He wondered atbrigands and volcanoes, but that very wonder was English The very conception that Italy consists of thesethings was an English conception The root things he never understood, the Roman legend, the ancient life ofthe Mediterranean, the world-old civilisation of the vine and olive, the mystery of the immutable Church Henever understood these things, and I am glad he never understood them: he could only have understood them

by ceasing to be the inspired cockney that he was, the rousing English Radical of the great Radical age inEngland That spirit of his was one of the things that we have had which were truly national All other forces

we have borrowed, especially those which flatter us most Imperialism is foreign, socialism is foreign,

militarism is foreign, education is foreign, strictly even Liberalism is foreign But Radicalism was our own; asEnglish as the hedgerows

Dickens abroad, then, was for all serious purposes simply the Englishman abroad; the Englishman man abroad

is for all serious purposes simply the Englishman at home Of this generalisation one modification must bemade Dickens did feel a direct pleasure in the bright and busy exterior of the French life, the clean caps, thecoloured uniforms, the skies like blue enamel, the little green trees, the little white houses, the scene pickedout in primary colours, like a child's picture book This he felt, and this he put (by a stroke of genius) into themouth of Mrs Lirriper, a London landlady on a holiday: for Dickens always knew that it is the simple and notthe subtle who feel differences; and he saw all his colours through the clear eyes of the poor And in thustaking to his heart the streets, as it were, rather than the spires of the Continent, he showed beyond questionthat combination of which we have spoken of common sense with common sensibility For it is for the sake

of the streets and shops and the coats and hats, that we should go abroad; they are far better worth going to seethan the castles and cathedrals and Roman camps For the wonders of the world are the same all over theworld, at least all over the European world Castles that throw valleys in shadow, minsters that strike the sky,roads so old that they seem to have been made by the gods, these are in all Christian countries The marvels ofman are at all our doors A labourer hoeing turnips in Sussex has no need to be ignorant that the bones ofEurope are the Roman roads A clerk living in Lambeth has no need not to know that there was a Christian artexuberant in the thirteenth century; for only across the river he can see the live stones of the Middle Agessurging together towards the stars But exactly the things that do strike the traveller as extraordinary are theordinary things, the food, the clothes, the vehicles; the strange things are cosmopolitan, the common things

are national and peculiar Cologne spire is lifted on the same arches as Canterbury; but the thing you cannotsee out of Germany is a German beer-garden There is no need for a Frenchman to go to look at WestminsterAbbey as a piece of English architecture; it is not in the special sense a piece of English architecture But ahansom cab is a piece of English architecture; a thing produced by the peculiar poetry of our cities, a symbol

of a certain reckless comfort which is really English; a thing to draw a pilgrimage of the nations The

imaginative Englishman will be found all day in a café; the imaginative Frenchman in a hansom cab

This sort of pleasure Dickens took in the Latin life; but no deeper kind And the strongest of all possibleindications of his fundamental detachment from it can be found in one fact A great part of the time that hewas in Italy he was engaged in writing "The Chimes," and such Christmas tales, tales of Christmas in theEnglish towns, tales full of fog and snow and hail and happiness

Dickens could find in any street divergences between man and man deeper than the divisions of nations Hisfault was to exaggerate differences He could find types almost as distinct as separate tribes of animals in hisown brain and his own city, those two homes of a magnificent chaos The only two southerners introducedprominently into his novels, the two in "Little Dorrit," are popular English foreigners, I had almost said stageforeigners Villainy is, in English eyes, a southern trait, therefore one of the foreigners is villainous Vivacity

is, in English eyes, another southern trait, therefore the other foreigner is vivacious But we can see from theoutlines of both that Dickens did not have to go to Italy to get them While poor panting millionaires, poortired earls and poor God-forsaken American men of culture are plodding about Italy for literary inspiration,Charles Dickens made up the whole of that Italian romance (as I strongly suspect) from the faces of twoLondon organ-grinders

In the sunlight of the southern world, he was still dreaming of the firelight of the north Among the palacesand the white campanili, he shut his eyes to see Marylebone and dreamed a lovely dream of chimney-pots Hewas not happy, he said, without streets The very foulness and smoke of London were lovable in his eyes andfill his Christmas tales with a vivid vapour In the clear skies of the south he saw afar off the fog of Londonlike a sunset cloud and longed to be in the core of it

This Christmas tone of Dickens, in connection with his travels, is a matter that can only be expressed by aparallel with one of his other works Much the same that has here been said of his "Pictures from Italy," may

be said about his "Child's History of England;" with the difference that while the "Pictures from Italy" do in asense add to his fame, the "History of England" in almost every sense detracts from it But the nature of thelimitation is the same What Dickens was travelling in distant lands, that he was travelling in distant ages; asturdy, sentimental English Radical with a large heart and a narrow mind He could not help falling into thatbesetting sin or weakness of the modern progressive, the habit of regarding the contemporary questions as theeternal questions and the latest word as the last He could not get out of his head the instinctive conceptionthat the real problem before St Dunstan was whether he should support Lord John Russell or Sir Robert Peel

He could not help seeing the remotest peaks lit up by the raging bonfire of his own passionate political crisis

He lived for the instant and its urgency; that is, he did what St Dunstan did He lived in an eternal present likeall simple men It is indeed "A Child's History of England;" but the child is the writer and not the reader.But Dickens in his cheapest cockney utilitarianism was not only English, but unconsciously historic Uponhim descended the real tradition of "Merry England," and not upon the pallid mediævalists who thought theywere reviving it The Pre-Raphaelites, the Gothicists, the admirers of the Middle Ages, had in their subtletyand sadness the spirit of the present day Dickens had in his buffoonery and bravery the spirit of the MiddleAges He was much more mediæval in his attacks on mediævalism than they were in their defences of it Itwas he who had the things of Chaucer, the love of large jokes and long stories and brown ale and all the whiteroads of England Like Chaucer he loved story within story, every man telling a tale Like Chaucer he sawsomething openly comic in men's motley trades Sam Weller would have been a great gain to the CanterburyPilgrimage and told an admirable story Rosetti's Damozel would have been a great bore, regarded as too fast

by the Prioress and too priggish by the Wife of Bath It is said that in the somewhat sickly Victorian revival of

feudalism which was called "Young England," a nobleman hired a hermit to live in his grounds It is also saidthat the hermit struck for more beer Whether this anecdote be true or not, it is always told as showing acollapse from the ideal of the Middle Ages to the level of the present day But in the mere act of striking forbeer the holy man was very much more "medieval" than the fool who employed him.

It would be hard to find a better example of this than Dickens's great defence of Christmas In fighting forChristmas he was fighting for the old European festival Pagan and Christian, for that trinity of eating,

drinking and praying which to moderns appears irreverent, for the holy day which is really a holiday He hadhimself the most babyish ideas about the past He supposed the Middle Ages to have consisted of tournamentsand torture-chambers, he supposed himself to be a brisk man of the manufacturing age, almost a Utilitarian.But for all that he defended the mediæval feast which was going out against the Utilitarianism which wascoming in He could only see all that was bad in mediævalism But he fought for all that was good in it And

he was all the more really in sympathy with the old strength and simplicity because he only knew that it wasgood and did not know that it was old He cared as little for mediævalism as the mediævals did He cared asmuch as they did for lustiness and virile laughter and sad tales of good lovers and pleasant tales of good livers

He would have been very much bored by Ruskin and Walter Pater if they had explained to him the strangesunset tints of Lippi and Botticelli He had no pleasure in looking on the dying Middle Ages But he looked onthe living Middle Ages, on a piece of the old uproarious superstition still unbroken; and he hailed it like a newreligion The Dickens character ate pudding to an extent at which the modern mediævalists turned pale Theywould do every kind of honour to an old observance, except observing it They would pay to a Church feastevery sort of compliment except feasting

And (as I have said) as were his unconscious relations to our European past, so were his unconscious relations

to England He imagined himself to be, if anything, a sort of cosmopolitan; at any rate to be a champion of thecharms and merits of continental lands against the arrogance of our island But he was in truth very muchmore a champion of the old and genuine England against that comparatively cosmopolitan England which wehave all lived to see And here again the supreme example is Christmas Christmas is, as I have said, one ofnumberless old European feasts of which the essence is the combination of religion with merry-making Butamong those feasts it is also especially and distinctively English in the style of its merry-making and even inthe style of its religion For the character of Christmas (as distinct, for instance, from the continental Easter)lies chiefly in two things; first on the terrestrial side the note of comfort rather than the note of brightness; and

on the spiritual side, Christian charity rather than Christian ecstasy And comfort is, like charity, a veryEnglish instinct Nay, comfort is, like charity, an English merit; though our comfort may and does degenerateinto materialism, just as our charity may and does degenerate into laxity and make-believe

This ideal of comfort belongs peculiarly to England; it belongs peculiarly to Christmas; above all, it belongspre-eminently to Dickens And it is astonishingly misunderstood It is misunderstood by the continent ofEurope; it is, if possible, still more misunderstood by the English of to-day On the Continent the restaurateursprovide us with raw beef, as if we were savages; yet old English cooking takes as much care as French And

in England has arisen a parvenu patriotism which represents the English as everything but English; as a blend

of Chinese stoicism, Latin militarism, Prussian rigidity, and American bad taste And so England, whose fault

is gentility and whose virtue is geniality, England with her tradition of the great gay gentlemen of Elizabeth, isrepresented to the four quarters of the world (as in Mr Kipling's religious poems) in the enormous image of asolemn cad And because it is very difficult to be comfortable in the suburbs, the suburbs have voted thatcomfort is a gross and material thing Comfort, especially this vision of Christmas comfort, is the reverse of agross or material thing It is far more poetical, properly speaking, than the Garden of Epicurus It is far moreartistic than the Palace of Art It is more artistic because it is based upon a contrast, a contrast between the fireand wine within the house and the winter and the roaring rains without It is far more poetical, because there is

in it a note of defence, almost of war; a note of being besieged by the snow and hail; of making merry in thebelly of a fort The man who said that an Englishman's house is his castle said much more than he meant TheEnglishman thinks of his house as something fortified and provisioned, and his very surliness is at root

romantic And this sense would naturally be strongest in wild winter nights, when the lowered portcullis and

the lifted drawbridge do not merely bar people out, but bar people in The Englishman's house is most sacred,not merely when the King cannot enter it, but when the Englishman cannot get out of it.

This comfort, then, is an abstract thing, a principle The English poor shut all their doors and windows tilltheir rooms reek like the Black Hole They are suffering for an idea Mere animal hedonism would not dream,

as we English do, of winter feasts and little rooms, but of eating fruit in large and idle gardens Mere

sensuality would desire to please all its senses But to our good dreams this dark and dangerous background isessential; the highest pleasure we can imagine is a defiant pleasure, a happiness that stands at bay The word

"comfort" is not indeed the right word, it conveys too much of the slander of mere sense; the true word is

"cosiness," a word not translatable One, at least, of the essentials of it is smallness, smallness in preference tolargeness, smallness for smallness' sake The merry-maker wants a pleasant parlour, he would not give

twopence for a pleasant continent In our difficult time, of course, a fight for mere space has become

necessary Instead of being greedy for ale and Christmas pudding we are greedy for mere air, an equallysensual appetite In abnormal conditions this is wise; and the illimitable veldt is an excellent thing for nervouspeople But our fathers were large and healthy enough to make a thing humane, and not worry about whether

it was hygienic They were big enough to get into small rooms

Of this quite deliberate and artistic quality in the close Christmas chamber, the standing evidence is Dickens

in Italy He created these dim firelit tales like little dim red jewels, as an artistic necessity, in the centre of anendless summer Amid the white cities of Tuscany he hungered for something romantic, and wrote about arainy Christmas Amid the pictures of the Uffizi he starved for something beautiful, and fed his memory onLondon fog His feeling for the fog was especially poignant and typical In the first of his Christmas tales, thepopular "Christmas Carol," he suggested the very soul of it in one simile, when he spoke of the dense air,suggesting that "Nature was brewing on a large scale." This sense of the thick atmosphere as something to eat

or drink, something not only solid but satisfactory, may seem almost insane, but it is no exaggeration ofDickens's emotion We speak of a fog "that you could cut with a knife." Dickens would have liked the phrase

as suggesting that the fog was a colossal cake He liked even more his own phrase of the Titanic brewery, and

no dream would have given him a wilder pleasure than to grope his way to some such tremendous vats anddrink the ale of the giants

There is a current prejudice against fogs, and Dickens, perhaps, is their only poet Considered hygienically, nodoubt this may be more or less excusable But, considered poetically, fog is not undeserving, it has a realsignificance We have in our great cities abolished the clean and sane darkness of the country We haveoutlawed night and sent her wandering in wild meadows; we have lit eternal watch-fires against her return

We have made a new cosmos, and as a consequence our own sun and stars And as a consequence also, andmost justly, we have made our own darkness Just as every lamp is a warm human moon, so every fog is arich human nightfall If it were not for this mystic accident we should never see darkness, and he who hasnever seen darkness has never seen the sun Fog for us is the chief form of that outward pressure whichcompresses mere luxury into real comfort It makes the world small, in the same spirit as in that common andhappy cry that the world is small, meaning that it is full of friends The first man that emerges out of the mistwith a light, is for us Prometheus, a saviour bringing fire to men He is that greatest and best of all men,greater than the heroes, better than the saints, Man Friday Every rumble of a cart, every cry in the distance,marks the heart of humanity beating undaunted in the darkness It is wholly human; man toiling in his owncloud If real darkness is like the embrace of God, this is the dark embrace of man

In such a sacred cloud the tale called "The Christmas Carol" begins, the first and most typical of all his

Christmas tales It is not irrelevant to dilate upon the geniality of this darkness, because it is characteristic ofDickens that his atmospheres are more important than his stories The Christmas atmosphere is more

important than Scrooge, or the ghosts either; in a sense, the background is more important than the figures.The same thing may be noticed in his dealings with that other atmosphere (besides that of good humour)which he excelled in creating, an atmosphere of mystery and wrong, such as that which gathers round Mrs.Clennam, rigid in her chair, or old Miss Havisham, ironically robed as a bride Here again the atmosphere

altogether eclipses the story, which often seems disappointing in comparison The secrecy is sensational; thesecret is tame The surface of the thing seems more awful than the core of it It seems almost as if these grislyfigures, Mrs Chadband and Mrs Clennam, Miss Havisham, and Miss Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, werekeeping something back from the author as well as from the reader When the book closes we do not knowtheir real secret They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth The darkhouse of Arthur Clennam's childhood really depresses us; it is a true glimpse into that quiet street in hell,where live the children of that unique dispensation which theologians call Calvinism and Christians

devil-worship But some stranger crime had really been done there, some more monstrous blasphemy orhuman sacrifice than the suppression of some silly document advantageous to the silly Dorrits Somethingworse than a common tale of jilting lay behind the masquerade and madness of the awful Miss Havisham.Something worse was whispered by the misshapen Quilp to the sinister Sally in that wild, wet summer-house

by the river, something worse than the clumsy plot against the clumsy Kit These dark pictures seem almost as

if they were literally visions; things, that is, that Dickens saw but did not understand

And as with his backgrounds of gloom, so with his backgrounds of good-will, in such tales as "The ChristmasCarol." The tone of the tale is kept throughout in a happy monotony, though the tale is everywhere irregularand in some places weak It has the same kind of artistic unity that belongs to a dream A dream may beginwith the end of the world and end with a tea-party; but either the end of the world will em as trivial as atea-party or that tea-party will be as terrible as the day of doom The incidents change wildly; the story

scarcely changes at all "The Christmas Carol" is a kind of philanthropic dream, an enjoyable nightmare, inwhich the scenes shift bewilderingly and seem as miscellaneous as the pictures in a scrap-book, but in whichthere is one constant state of the soul, a state of rowdy benediction and a hunger for human faces The

beginning is bout a winter day and a miser; yet the beginning is in no way bleak The author starts with a kind

of happy howl; he bangs on our door like a drunken carol singer; his style is festive and popular; he comparesthe snow and hail to philanthropists who "come down handsomely;" he compares the fog to unlimited beer.Scrooge is not really inhuman at the beginning any more than he is at the end There is a heartiness in hisinhospitable sentiments that is akin to humour and therefore to humanity; he is only a crusty old bachelor, andhad (I strongly suspect) given away turkeys secretly all his life The beauty and the real blessing of the story

do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable; they lie in the greatfurnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him; that great furnace, the heart

of Dickens Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us Whether or

no the visions were evoked by real Spirits of the Past, Present, and Future, they were evoked by that trulyexalted order of angels who are correctly called High Spirits They are impelled and sustained by a qualitywhich our contemporary artists ignore or almost deny, but which in a life decently lived is as normal andattainable as sleep, positive, passionate, conscious joy The story sings from end to end like a happy mangoing home; and, like a happy and good man, when it cannot sing it yells It is lyric and exclamatory, from thefirst exclamatory words of it It is strictly a Christmas carol

Dickens, as has been said, went to Italy with this kindly cloud still about him, still meditating on Yule

mysteries Among the olives and the orange-trees he wrote his second great Christmas tale, "The Chimes," atGenoa in 1844, a Christmas tale only differing from "The Christmas Carol" in being fuller of the grey rains ofwinter and the north "The Chimes" is, like the "Carol," an appeal for charity and mirth, but it is a stern andfighting appeal: if the other is a Christmas carol, this is a Christmas war-song In it Dickens hurled himselfwith even more than his usual militant joy and scorn into an attack upon a cant, which he said made his bloodboil This cant was nothing more nor less than the whole tone taken by three-quarters of the political andeconomic world towards the poor It was a vague and vulgar Benthamism with a rollicking Tory touch in it Itexplained to the poor their duties with a cold and coarse philanthropy unendurable by any free man It hadalso at its command a kind of brutal banter, a loud good humour which Dickens sketches savagely in

Alderman Cute He fell furiously on all their ideas: the cheap advice to live cheaply, the base advice to livebasely, above all, the preposterous primary assumption that the rich are to advise the poor and not the poor therich There were and are hundreds of these benevolent bullies Some say that the poor should give up havingchildren, which means that they should give up their great virtue of sexual sanity Some say that they should

give up "treating" each other, which means that they should give up all that remains to them of the virtue ofhospitality Against all of this Dickens thundered very thoroughly in "The Chimes." It may be remarked inpassing that this affords another instance of a confusion already referred to, the confusion whereby Dickenssupposed himself to be exalting the present over the past, whereas he was really dealing deadly blows atthings strictly peculiar to the present Embedded in this very book is a somewhat useless interview betweenTrotty Veck and the church bells, in which the latter lecture the former for having supposed (why, I don'tknow) that they were expressing regret for the disappearance of the Middle Ages There is no reason whyTrotty Veck or anyone else should idealise the Middle Ages, but certainly he was the last man in the world to

be asked to idealise the nineteenth century, seeing that the smug and stingy philosophy, which poisons his lifethrough the book, was an exclusive creation of that century But, as I have said before, the fieriest mediævalistmay forgive Dickens for disliking the good things the Middle Ages took away, considering how he lovedwhatever good things the Middle Ages left behind It matters very little that he hated old feudal castles whenthey were already old It matters very much that he hated the New Poor Law while it was still new

The moral of this matter in "The Chimes" is essential Dickens had sympathy with the poor in the Greek andliteral sense; he suffered with them mentally; for the things that irritated them were the things that irritatedhim He did not pity the people, or even champion the people, or even merely love the people; in this matter

he was the people He alone in our literature is the voice not merely of the social substratum, but even of thesubconsciousness of the substratum He utters the secret anger of the humble He says what the uneducatedonly think, or even only feel, about the educated And in nothing is he so genuinely such a voice as in this fact

of his fiercest mood being reserved for methods that are counted scientific and progressive Pure and exaltedatheists talk themselves into believing that the working-classes are turning with indignant scorn from thechurches The working-classes are not indignant against the churches in the least The things the

working-classes really are indignant against are the hospitals The people has no definite disbelief in thetemples of theology The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the temples of physical science Thethings the poor hate are the modern things, the rationalistic things doctors, inspectors, poor law guardians,professional philanthropy They never showed any reluctance to be helped by the old and corrupt monasteries.They will often die rather than be helped by the modern and efficient workhouse Of all this anger, good orbad, Dickens is the voice of an accusing energy When, in "The Christmas Carol," Scrooge refers to thesurplus population, the Spirit tells him, very justly, not to speak till he knows what the surplus is and where it

is The implication is severe but sound When a group of superciliously benevolent economists look down intothe abyss for the surplus population, assuredly there is only one answer that should be given to them; and that

is to say, "If there is a surplus, you are a surplus." And if anyone were ever cut off, they would be If thebarricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters, I think the priests would escape, I fear thegentlemen would; but I believe the gutters would be simply running with the blood of philanthropists

Lastly, he was at one with the poor in this chief matter of Christmas, in the matter, that is, of special festivity.There is nothing on which the poor are more criticised than on the point of spending large sums on smallfeasts; and though there are material difficulties, there is nothing in which they are more right It is said that aBoston paradox-monger said, "Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with the necessities." But it isthe whole human race that says it, from the first savage wearing feathers instead of clothes to the last

costermonger having a treat instead of three meals

The third of his Christmas stories, "The Cricket on the Hearth," calls for no extensive comment, though it isvery characteristic It has all the qualities which we have called dominant qualities in his Christmas sentiment

It has cosiness, that is the comfort that depends upon a discomfort surrounding it It has a sympathy with thepoor, and especially with the extravagance of the poor; with what may be called the temporary wealth of thepoor It has the sentiment of the hearth, that is, the sentiment of the open fire being the red heart of the room.That open fire is the veritable flame of England, still kept burning in the midst of a mean civilisation ofstoves But everything that is valuable in "The Cricket on the Hearth" is perhaps as well expressed in the title

as it is in the story The tale itself, in spite of some of those inimitable things that Dickens never failed to say,

is a little too comfortable to be quite convincing "The Christmas Carol" is the conversion of an

anti-Christmas character "The Chimes" is a slaughter of anti-Christmas characters "The Cricket," perhaps,fails for lack of this crusading note For everything has its weak side, and when full justice has been done tothis neglected note of poetic comfort, we must remember that it has its very real weak side The defect of it inthe work of Dickens was that he tended sometimes to pile up the cushions until none of the characters couldmove He is so much interested in effecting his state of static happiness that he forgets to make a story at all.His princes at the start of the story begin to live happily ever afterwards We feel this strongly in "MasterHumphrey's Clock" and we feel it sometimes in these Christmas stories He makes his characters so

comfortable that his characters begin to dream and drivel And he makes his reader so comfortable that hisreader goes to sleep

The actual tale of the carrier and his wife sounds somewhat sleepily in our ears; we cannot keep our attentionfixed on it, though we are conscious of a kind of warmth from it as from a great wood fire We know so wellthat everything will soon be all right that we do not suspect when the carrier suspects, and are not frightenedwhen the gruff Tackleton growls The sound of the festivities at the end come fainter on our ears than did theshout of the Cratchits or the bells of Trotty Veck All the good figures that followed Scrooge when he camegrowling out of the fog fade into the fog again

CHAPTER VIII

THE TIME OF TRANSITION

Dickens was back in London by the June of 1845 About this time he became the first editor of The DailyNews, a paper which he had largely planned and suggested, and which, I trust, remembers its semi-divineorigin That his thoughts had been running, as suggested in the last chapter, somewhat monotonously on hisChristmas domesticities, is again suggested by the rather singular fact that he originally wished The DailyNews to be called The Cricket Probably he was haunted again with his old vision of a homely, tale-tellingperiodical such as had broken off in "Master Humphrey's Clock." About this time, however, he was peculiarlyunsettled Almost as soon as he had taken the editorship he threw it up; and having only recently come back toEngland, he soon made up his mind to go back to the Continent In the May of 1846 he ran over to

Switzerland and tried to write "Dombey and Son" at Lausanne Tried to, I say, because his letters are full of anangry impotence He could not get on He attributed this especially to his love of London and his loss of it,

"the absence of streets and numbers of figures My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowdsabout them." But he also, with shrewdness, attributed it more generally to the laxer and more wandering life

he had led for the last two years, the American tour, the Italian tour, diversified, generally speaking, only withslight literary productions His ways were never punctual or healthy, but they were also never unconscientious

as far as work was concerned If he walked all night he could write all day But in this strange exile or

interregnum he did not seem able to fall into any habits, even bad habits A restlessness beyond all his

experience had fallen for a season upon the most restless of the children of men

It may be a mere coincidence: but this break in his life very nearly coincided with the important break in hisart "Dombey and Son," planned in all probability some time before, was destined to be the last of a quitedefinite series, the early novels of Dickens The difference between the books from the beginning up to

"Dombey," and the books from "David Copperfield" to the end may be hard to state dogmatically, but isevident to every one with any literary sense Very coarsely, the case may be put by saying that he diminished,

in the story as a whole, the practice of pure caricature Still more coarsely it may be put in the phrase that hebegan to practise realism If we take Mr Stiggins, say, as a clergyman depicted at the beginning of his literarycareer, and Mr Crisparkle, say, as a clergyman depicted at the end of it, it is evident that the difference doesnot merely consist in the fact that the first is a less desirable clergyman than the second It consists in thenature of our desire for either of them The glory of Mr Crisparkle partly consists in the fact that he mightreally exist anywhere, in any country town into which we may happen to stray The glory of Mr Stigginswholly consists in the fact that he could not possibly exist anywhere except in the head of Dickens Dickenshas the secret recipe of that divine dish In some sense, therefore, when we say that he became less of acaricaturist we mean that he became less of a creator That original violent vision of all things which he hadseen from his boyhood began to be mixed with other men's milder visions and with the light of common day

He began to understand and practise other than his own mad merits; began to have some movement towardsthe merits of other writers, towards the mixed emotion of Thackeray, or the solidity of George Eliot And thismust be said for the process; that the fierce wine of Dickens could endure some dilution On the whole,perhaps, his primal personalism was all the better when surging against some saner restraints Perhaps aflavour of strong Stiggins goes a long way Perhaps the colossal Crummles might be cut down into six orseven quite creditable characters For my own part, for reasons which I shall afterwards mention, I am in realdoubt about the advantage of this realistic education of Dickens I am not sure that it made his books better;but I am sure it made them less bad He made fewer mistakes undoubtedly; he succeeded in eliminating much

of the mere rant or cant of his first books; he threw away much of the old padding, all the more annoying,perhaps, in a literary sense, because he did not mean it for padding, but for essential eloquence But he did notproduce anything actually better than Mr Chuckster But then there is nothing better than Mr Chuckster.Certain works of art, such as the Venus of Milo, exhaust our aspiration Upon the whole this may, perhaps, besafely said of the transition Those who have any doubt about Dickens can have no doubt of the superiority ofthe later books Beyond question they have less of what annoys us in Dickens But do not, if you are in thecompany of any ardent adorers of Dickens (as I hope for your sake you are), do not insist too urgently and

exclusively on the splendour of Dickens's last works, or they will discover that you do not like him.

"Dombey and Son" is the last novel in the first manner: "David Copperfield" is the first novel in the last Theincrease in care and realism in the second of the two is almost startling Yet even in "Dombey and Son" wecan see the coming of a change, however faint, if we compare it with his first fantasies such as "NicholasNickleby" or "The Old Curiosity Shop." The central story is still melodrama, bat it is much more tactful andeffective melodrama Melodrama is a form of art, legitimate like any other, as noble as farce, almost as noble

as pantomime The essence of melodrama is that it appeals to the moral sense in a highly simplified state, just

as farce appeals to the sense of humour in a highly simplified state Farce creates people who are so

intellectually simple as to hide in packing-cases or pretend to be their own aunts Melodrama creates people somorally simple as to kill their enemies in Oxford Street, and repent on seeing their mother's photograph Theobject of the simplification in farce and melodrama is the same, and quite artistically legitimate, the object ofgaining a resounding rapidity of action which subtleties would obstruct And this can be done well or ill Thesimplified villain can be a spirited charcoal sketch or a mere black smudge Carker is a spirited charcoalsketch: Ralph Nickleby is a mere black smudge The tragedy of Edith Dombey teems with unlikelihood, but itteems with life That Dombey should give his own wife censure through his own business manager is

impossible, I will not say in a gentleman, but in a person of ordinary sane self-conceit But once having gotthe inconceivable trio before the footlights, Dickens gives us good ringing dialogue very different from themere rants in which Ralph Nickleby figures in the unimaginable character of a rhetorical money-lender Andthere is another point of technical improvement in this book over such books as "Nicholas Nickleby." It hasnot only a basic idea, but a good basic idea There is a real artistic opportunity in the conception of a solemnand selfish man of affairs, feeling for his male heir, his first and last emotion, mingled of a thin flame oftenderness and a strong flame of pride But with all these possibilities, the serious episode of the Dombeysserves ultimately only to show how unfitted Dickens was for such things, how fitted he was for somethingopposite

The incurable poetic character, the hopelessly non-realistic character of Dickens's essential genius could nothave a better example than the story of the Dombeys For the story itself is probable; it is the treatment thatmakes it unreal In attempting to paint the dark pagan devotion of the father (as distant from the ecstatic andChristian devotion of the mother) Dickens was painting something that was really there This is no wildtheme, like the wanderings of Nell's grandfather, or the marriage of Gride A man of Dombey's type wouldlove his son as he loves Paul He would neglect his daughter as he neglects Florence And yet we feel the utterunreality of it all, while we feel the utter reality of monsters like Stiggins or Mantalini Dickens could onlywork in his own way, and that way was the wild way We may almost say this: that he could only make hischaracters probable if he was allowed to make them impossible Give him licence to say and do anything, and

he could create beings as vivid as our own aunts and uncles Keep him to likelihood and he could not tell theplainest tale so as to make it seem likely The story of "Pickwick" is credible, although it is not possible Thestory of Florence Dombey is incredible although it is true

An excellent example can be found in the same story Major Bagstock is a grotesque, and yet he containstouch after touch of Dickens's quiet and sane observation of things as they are He was always most accuratewhen he was most fantastic Dombey and Florence are perfectly reasonable, but we simply know that they donot exist The Major is mountainously exaggerated, but we all feel that we have met him at Brighton Nor isthe rationale of the paradox difficult to see; Dickens exaggerated when he had found a real truth to exaggerate

It is a deadly error (an error at the back of much of the false placidity of our politics) to suppose that lies aretold with excess and luxuriance, and truths told with modesty and restraint Some of the most frantic lies onthe face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint willsave them Many official declarations are just as dignified as Mr Dombey, because they are just as fictitious

On the other hand, the man who has found a truth dances about like a boy who has found a shilling; he breaksinto extravagances, as the Christian churches broke into gargoyles In one sense truth alone can be

exaggerated; nothing else can stand the strain The outrageous Bagstock is a glowing and glaring exaggeration

of a thing we have all seen in life the worst and most dangerous of all its hypocrisies For the worst and most

dangerous hypocrite is not he who affects unpopular virtue, but he who affects popular vice The jolly fellow

of the saloon bar and the racecourse is the real deceiver of mankind; he has misled more than any false

prophet, and his victims cry to him out of hell The excellence of the Bagstock conception can best be seen if

we compare it with the much weaker and more improbable knavery of Pecksniff It would not be worth aman's while, with any worldly object, to pretend to be a holy and high-minded architect The world does notadmire holy and high-minded architects The world does admire rough and tough old army men who swear atwaiters and wink at women Major Bagstock is simply the perfect prophecy of that decadent jingoism whichcorrupted England of late years England has been duped, not by the cant of goodness, but by the cant ofbadness It has been fascinated by a quite fictitious cynicism, and reached that last and strangest of all

impostures in which the mask is as repulsive as the face

"Dombey and Son" provides us with yet another instance of this general fact in Dickens He could only get tothe most solemn emotions adequately if he got to them through the grotesque He could only, so to speak,really get into the inner chamber by coming down the chimney, like his own most lovable lunatic in "NicholasNickleby." A good example is such a character as Toots Toots is what none of Dickens's dignified charactersare, in the most serious sense, a true lover He is the twin of Romeo He has passion, humility,

self-knowledge, a mind lifted into all magnanimous thoughts, everything that goes with the best kind ofromantic love His excellence in the art of love can only be expressed by the somewhat violent expression that

he is as good a lover as Walter Gay is a bad one Florence surely deserved her father's scorn if she couldprefer Gay to Toots It is neither a joke nor any kind of exaggeration to say that in the vacillations of Toots,Dickens not only came nearer to the psychology of true love than he ever came elsewhere, but nearer thananyone else ever came To ask for the loved one, and then not to dare to cross the threshold, to be invited byher, to long to accept, and then to lie in order to decline, these are the funny things that Mr Toots did, and thatevery honest man who yells with laughter at him has done also For the moment, however, I only mention thismatter as a pendant case to the case of Major Bagstock, an example of the way in which Dickens had to beridiculous in order to begin to be true His characters that begin solemn end futile; his characters that beginfrivolous end solemn in the best sense His foolish figures are not only more entertaining than his seriousfigures, they are also much more serious The Marchioness is not only much more laughable than Little Nell;she is also much more of all that Little Nell was meant to be; much more really devoted, pathetic, and brave.Dick Swiveller is not only a much funnier fellow than Kit, he is also a much more genuine fellow, being freefrom that slight stain of "meekness," or the snobbishness of the respectable poor, which the wise and perfectChuckster wisely and perfectly perceived in Kit Susan Nipper is not only more of a comic character thanFlorence; she is more of a heroine than Florence any day of the week In "Our Mutual Friend" we do not, forsome reason or other, feel really very much excited about the fall or rescue of Lizzie Hexam She seems tooromantic to be really pathetic But we do feel excited about the rescue of Miss Podsnap, because she is, likeToots, a holy fool; because her pink nose and pink elbows, and candid outcry and open indecent affections doconvey to us a sense of innocence helpless among human dragons, of Andromeda tied naked to a rock

Dickens had to make a character humorous before he could make it human; it was the only way he knew, and

he ought to have always adhered to it Whether he knew it or not, the only two really touching figures in

"Martin Chuzzlewit" are the Misses Pecksniff Of the things he tried to treat unsmilingly and grandly we canall make game to our heart's content But when once he has laughed at a thing it is sacred for ever

"Dombey," however, means first and foremost the finale of the early Dickens It is difficult to say exactly inwhat it is that we perceive that the old crudity ends here, and does not reappear in "David Copperfield" or inany of the novels after it But so certainly it is In detached scenes and characters, indeed, Dickens kept up hisfarcical note almost or quite to the end But this is the last farce; this is the last work in which a farcicallicence is tacitly claimed, a farcical note struck to start with And in a sense his next novel may be called hisfirst novel But the growth of this great novel, "David Copperfield," is a thing very interesting, but at the sametime very dark, for it is a growth in the soul We have seen that Dickens's mind was in a stir of change; that hewas dreaming of art and even of realism Hugely delighted as he invariably was with his own books, he washumble enough to be ambitious He was even humble enough to be envious In the matter of art, for instance,

in the narrower sense, of arrangement and proportion in fictitious things, he began to be conscious of his

deficiency, and even, in a stormy sort of way, ashamed of it; he tried to gain completeness even while raging

at anyone who called him incomplete And in this manner of artistic construction, his ambition (and hissuccess too) grew steadily up to the instant of his death The end finds him attempting things that are at theopposite pole to the frank formlessness of "Pickwick." His last book, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," dependsentirely upon construction, even upon a centralised strategy He staked everything upon a plot; he who hadbeen the weakest of plotters, weaker than Sim Tappertit He essayed a detective story, he who could neverkeep a secret; and he has kept it to this day A new Dickens was really being born when Dickens died

And as with art, so with reality He wished to show that he could construct as well as anybody He also wished

to show that he could be as accurate as anybody And in this connection (as in many others) we must recurconstantly to the facts mentioned in connection with America and with his money-matters We must recur, Imean, to the central fact that his desires were extravagant in quantity, but not in quality; that his wishes wereexcessive, but not eccentric It must never be forgotten that sanity was his ideal, even when he seemed almostinsane It was thus with his literary aspirations He was brilliant; but he wished sincerely to be solid Nobodyout of an asylum could deny that he was a genius and an unique writer; but he did not wish to be an uniquewriter, but an universal writer Much of the manufactured pathos or rhetoric against which his enemies quiterightly rail, is really due to his desire to give all sides of life at once, to make his book a cosmos instead of atale He was sometimes really vulgar in his wish to be a literary Whiteley, an universal provider Thus it wasthat he felt about realism and truth to live Nothing is easier than to defend Dickens as Dickens, but Dickenswished to be everybody else Nothing is easier than to defend Dickens's world as a fairyland, of which healone has the key; to defend him as one defends Maeterlinck, or any other original writer But Dickens wasnot content with being original, he had a wild wish to be true He loved truth so much in the abstract that hesacrificed to the shadow of it his own glory He denied his own divine originality, and pretended that he hadplagiarised from life He disowned his own soul's children, and said he had picked them up in the street.And in this mixed and heated mood of anger and ambition, vanity and doubt, a new and great design wasborn He loved to be romantic, yet he desired to be real How if he wrote of a thing that was real and showedthat it was romantic? He loved real life; but he also loved his own way How if he wrote his own real life, butwrote it in his own way? How if he showed the carping critics who doubted the existence of his strangecharacters, his own yet stranger existence? How if he forced these pedants and unbelievers to admit thatWeller and Pecksniff, Crummles and Swiveller, whom they thought so improbably wild and wonderful, wereless wild and wonderful than Charles Dickens? What if he ended the quarrels about whether his romancescould occur, by confessing that his romance had occurred?

For some time past, probably during the greater part of his life, he had made notes for an autobiography Ihave already quoted an admirable passage from these notes, a passage reproduced in "David Copperfield,"with little more alteration than a change of proper names the passage which describes Captain Porter and thedebtor's petition in the Marshalsea But he probably perceived at last what a less keen intelligence mustultimately have perceived, that if an autobiography is really to be honest it must be turned into a work offiction If it is really to tell the truth, it must at all costs profess not to No man dare say of himself, over hisown name, how badly he has behaved No man dare say of himself over his own name, how well he hasbehaved Moreover, of course, a touch of fiction is almost always essential to the real conveying of fact,because fact, as experienced, has a fragmentariness which is bewildering at first hand and quite blinding atsecond hand Facts have at least to be sorted into compartments and the proper head and tail given back toeach The perfection and pointedness of art are a sort of substitute for the pungency of actuality Without thisselection and completion our life seems a tangle of unfinished tales, a heap of novels, all volume one Dickensdetermined to make one complete novel of it

For though there are many other aspects of "David Copperfield," this autobiographical aspect is, after all, thegreatest The point of the book is that, unlike all the other books of Dickens, it is concerned with quite

common actualities, but it is concerned with them warmly and with the warlike sympathies It is not only bothrealistic and romantic; it is realistic because it is romantic It is human nature described with the human

exaggeration We all know the actual types in the book; they are not like the turgid and preternatural typeselsewhere in Dickens They are not purely poetic creations like Mr Kenwigs or Mr Bunsby We all know thatthey exist We all know the stiff-necked and humorous old-fashioned nurse, so conventional and yet sooriginal, so dependent and yet so independent We all know the intrusive stepfather, the abstract strange male,coarse, handsome, sulky, successful, a breaker-up of homes We all know the erect and sardonic spinster, thespinster who is so mad in small things and so sane in great ones We all know the cock of the school; we allknow Steerforth, the creature whom the gods love and even the servants respect We know his poor andaristocratic mother, so proud, so gratified, so desolate We know the Rosa Dartle type, the lonely woman inwhom affection itself has stagnated into a sort of poison.

But while these are real characters they are real characters lit up with the colours of youth and passion Theyare real people romantically felt; that is to say, they are real people felt as real people feel them They areexaggerated, like all Dickens's figures: but they are not exaggerated as personalities are exaggerated by anartist; they are exaggerated as personalities are exaggerated by their own friends and enemies The strongsouls are seen through the glorious haze of the emotions that strong souls really create We have Murdstone as

he would be to a boy who hated him; and rightly, for a boy would hate him We have Steerforth as he would

be to a boy who adored him; and rightly, for a boy would adore him It may be that if these persons had amere terrestrial existence, they appeared to other eyes more insignificant It may be that Murdstone in

common life was only a heavy business man with a human side that David was too sulky to find It may bethat Steerforth was only an inch or two taller than David, and only a shade or two above him in the lowermiddle classes; but this does not make the book less true In cataloguing the facts of life the author must notomit that massive fact, illusion

When we say the book is true to life we must stipulate that it is especially true to youth: even to boyhood Allthe characters seem a little larger than they really were, for David is looking up at them And the early pages

of the book are in particular astonishingly vivid Parts of it seem like fragments of our forgotten infancy Thedark house of childhood, the loneliness, the things half understood, the nurse with her inscrutable sulks andher more inscrutable tenderness, the sudden deportations to distant places, the seaside and its childish

friendships, all this stirs in us when we read it, like something out of a previous existence Above all, Dickenshas excellently depicted the child enthroned in that humble circle which only in after years he perceives tohave been humble Modern and cultured persons, I believe, object to their children seeing kitchen company orbeing taught by a woman like Peggotty But surely it is more important to be educated in a sense of humandignity and equality than in anything else in the world And a child who has once had to respect a kind andcapable woman of the lower classes will respect the lower classes for ever The true way to overcome the evil

in class distinction is not to denounce them as revolutionists denounce them, but to ignore them as childrenignore them

The early youth of David Copperfield is psychologically almost as good as his childhood In one touch

especially Dickens pierced the very core of the sensibility of boyhood; it was when he made David moreafraid of a manservant than of anybody or anything else The lowering Murdstone, the awful Mrs Steerforthare not so alarming to him as Mr Littimer, the unimpeachable gentleman's gentleman This is exquisitely true

to the masculine emotions, especially in their undeveloped state A youth of common courage does not fearanything violent, but he is in mortal fear of anything correct This may or may not be the reason that so fewfemale writers understand their male characters, but this fact remains that the more sincere and passionate andeven headlong a lad is the more certain he is to be conventional The bolder and freer he seems the more thetraditions of the college or the rules of the club will hold him with their gyves of gossamer; and the less afraid

he is of his enemies the more cravenly he will be afraid of his friends Herein lies indeed the darkest period ofour ethical doubt and chaos The fear is that as morals become less urgent, manners will become more so; andmen who have forgotten the fear of God will retain the fear of Littimer We shall merely sink into a muchmeaner bondage For when you break the great laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy Youget the small laws

The sting and strength of this piece of fiction, then, do (by a rare accident) lie in the circumstance that it was

so largely founded on fact "David Copperfield" is the great answer of a great romancer to the realists Davidsays in effect: "What! you say that the Dickens tales are too purple really to have happened! Why, this is whathappened to me, and it seemed the most purple of all You say that the Dickens heroes are too handsome andtriumphant! Why, no prince or paladin in Ariosto was ever so handsome and triumphant as the Head Boyseemed to me walking before me in the sun You say the Dickens villains are too black I Why, there was noink in the devil's inkstand black enough for my own step-father when I had to live in the same house with him.The facts are quite the other way to what you suppose This life of grey studies and half-tones, the absence ofwhich you regret in Dickens, is only life as it is looked at This life of heroes and villains is life as it is lived.The life a man knows best is exactly the life he finds most full of fierce certainties and battles between goodand ill his own Oh yes, the life we do not care about may easily be a psychological comedy Other people'slives may easily be human documents But a man's own life is always a melodrama."

There are other effective things in "David Copperfield;" they are not all autobiographical, but they nearly allhave this new note of quietude and reality Micawber is gigantic; an immense assertion of the truth that theway to live is to exaggerate everything But of him I shall have to speak more fully in another connection.Mrs Micawber, artistically speaking, is even better She is very nearly the best thing in Dickens Nothingcould be more absurd, and at the same time more true, than her clear argumentative manner of speech as shesits smiling and expounding in the midst of ruin What could be more lucid and logical and unanswerable thanher statement of the prolegomena of the Medway problem, of which the first step must be to "see the

Medway," or of the coal-trade, which required talent and capital "Talent Mr Micawber has Capital Mr.Micawber has not." It seems as if something should have come at last out of so clear and scientific an

arrangement of the ideas Indeed if (as has been suggested) we regard "David Copperfield" as an unconsciousdefence of the poetic view of life, we might regard Mrs Micawber as an unconscious satire on the logicalview of life She sits as a monument of the hopelessness and helplessness of reason in the face of this

romantic and unreasonable world

As I have taken "Dombey and Son" as the book before the transition, and "David Copperfield" as typical ofthe transition itself, I may perhaps take "Bleak House" as the book after the transition, and so complete thedescription Bleak House has every characteristic of his new realistic culture Dickens never now, as in hisearly books, revels in the parts he likes and scamps the parts he does not, after the manner of Scott He doesnot, as in previous tales, leave his heroes and heroines mere walking gentlemen and ladies with nothing at all

to do but walk: he expends upon them at least ingenuity By the expedients (successful or not) of the

self-revelation of Esther or the humorous inconsistencies of Rick, he makes his younger figures if not lovable

at least readable Everywhere we see this tighter and more careful grip He does not, for instance, when hewishes to denounce a dark institution, sandwich it in as a mere episode in a rambling story of adventure, as thedebtor's prison is embedded in the body of "Pickwick" or the low Yorkshire school in the body of "NicholasNickleby." He puts the Court of Chancery in the centre of the stage, a sombre and sinister temple, and groupsround it in artistic relation decaying and frantic figures, its offspring and its satirists, An old dipsomaniackeeps a rag and bone shop, type of futility and antiquity, and calls himself the Lord Chancellor A little madold maid hangs about the courts on a forgotten or imaginary lawsuit, and says with perfect and pungent irony,

"I am expecting a judgment shortly On the Day of Judgment." Rick and Ada and Esther are not mere strollerswho have strayed into the court of law, they are its children, its symbols, and its victims The righteous

indignation of the book is not at the red heat of anarchy, but at the white heat of art Its anger is patient andplodding, like some historic revenge Moreover, it slowly and carefully creates the real psychology of

oppression The endless formality, the endless unemotional urbanity, the endless hope deferred, these thingsmake one feel the fact of injustice more than the madness of Nero For it is not the activeness of tyranny thatmaddens, but its passiveness We hate the deafness of the god more than his strength Silence is the

unbearable repartee

Again we can see in this book strong traces of an increase in social experience Dickens, as his fame carriedhim into more fashionable circles, began really to understand something of what is strong and what is weak in

the English upper class Sir Leicester Dedlock is a far more effective condemnation of oligarchy than the uglyswagger of Sir Mulberry Hawk, because pride stands out more plainly in all its impotence and insolence as theone weakness of a good man, than as one of the million weaknesses of a bad one Dickens, like all youngRadicals, had imagined in his youth that aristocracy rested upon the hardness of somebody; he found, as weall do, that it rests upon the softness of everybody It is very hard not to like Sir Leicester Dedlock, not toapplaud his silly old speeches, so foolish, so manly, so genuinely English, so disastrous to England It is truethat the English people love a lord, but it is not true that they fear him; rather, if anything, they pity him; therecreeps into their love something of the feeling they have towards a baby or a black man In their hearts theythink it admirable that Sir Leicester Dedlock should be able to speak at all And so a system, which no ironlaws and no bloody battles could possibly force upon a people, is preserved from generation to generation bypure, weak good-nature.

In "Bleak House" occurs the character of Harold Skimpole, the character whose alleged likeness to LeighHunt has laid Dickens open to so much disapproval Unjust disapproval, I think, as far as fundamental moralsare concerned In method he was a little clamorous and clumsy, as, indeed, he was apt to be But when he saidthat it was possible to combine a certain tone of conversation taken from a particular man with other

characteristics which were not meant to be his, he surely said what all men who write stories know A work offiction often consists in combining a pair of whiskers seen in one street with a crime seen in another He mayquite possibly have really meant only to make Leigh Hunt's light philosophy the mask for a new kind ofscamp, as a variant on the pious mask of Pecksniff or the candid mask of Bagstock He may never once havehad the unfriendly thought, "Suppose Hunt behaved like a rascal!" he may have only had the fanciful thought,

"Suppose a rascal behaved like Hunt!"

But there is a good reason for mentioning Skimpole especially In the character of Skimpole, Dickens

displayed again a quality that was very admirable in him I mean a disposition to see things sanely and tosatirise even his own faults He was commonly occupied in satirising the Gradgrinds, the economists, the men

of Smiles and Self-Help For him there was nothing poorer than their wealth, nothing more selfish than theirself-denial And against them he was in the habit of pitting the people of a more expansive habit the happySwivellers and Micawbers, who, if they were poor, were at least as rich as their last penny could make them

He loved that great Christian carelessness that seeks its meat from God It was merely a kind of uncontrollablehonesty that forced him into urging the other side He could not disguise from himself or from the world thatman who began by seeking his meat from his neighbour without apprising his neighbour of the fact He hadshown how good irresponsibility could be; he could not stoop to hide how bad it could be He created

Skimpole; and Skimpole is the dark underside of Micawber

In attempting Skimpole he attempted something with a great and urgent meaning He attempted it, I say; I donot assert that he carried it through As has been remarked, he was never successful in describing

psychological change; his characters are the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever And critics have

complained very justly of the crude villainy of Skimpole's action in the matter of Joe and Mr Bucket

Certainly Skimpole had no need to commit a clumsy treachery to win a clumsy bribe; he had only to call on

Mr Jarndyce He had lost his honour too long to need to sell it

The effect is bad; but I repeat that the aim was great Dickens wished, under the symbol of Skimpole, to pointout a truth which is perhaps the most terrible in moral psychology I mean the fact that it is by no means easy

to draw the line between light and heavy offence He desired to show that there are no faults, however kindly,that we can afford to flatter or to let alone; he meant that perhaps Skimpole had once been as good a man asSwiveller If flattered or let alone, our kindliest fault can destroy our kindliest virtue A thing may begin as avery human weakness and end as a very inhuman weakness Skimpole means that the extremes of evil aremuch nearer than we think A man may begin by being too generous to pay his debts, and end by being toomean to pay his debts For the vices are very strangely in league, and encourage each other A sober man maybecome a drunkard through being a coward A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard.That is the thing Dickens was darkly trying to convey in Skimpole that a man might become a mountain of

selfishness if he attended only to the Dickens virtues There is nothing that can be neglected; there is no suchthing (he meant) as a peccadillo.

I have dwelt on this consciousness of his because, alas, it had a very sharp edge for himself Even while hewas permitting a fault originally small to make a comedy of Skimpole, a fault originally small was making atragedy of Charles Dickens For Dickens also had a bad quality, not intrinsically very terrible, which heallowed to wreck his life He also had a small weakness that could sometimes become stronger than all hisstrengths His selfishness was not, it need hardly be said, the selfishness of Gradgrind; he was particularlycompassionate and liberal Nor was it in the least the selfishness of Skimpole He was entirely self-dependent,industrious, and dignified His selfishness was wholly a selfishness of the nerves Whatever his whim or thetemperature of the instant told him to do must be done He was the type of man who would break a window if

it would not open and give him air And this weakness of his had, by the time of which we speak, led to abreach between himself and his wife which he was too exasperated and excited to heal in time Everythingmust be put right, and put right at once, with him If London bored him, he must go to the Continent at once;

if the Continent bored him, he must come back to London at once If the day was too noisy, the whole

household must be quiet; if night was too quiet, the whole household must wake up Above all, he had thesupreme character of the domestic despot that his good temper was, if possible, more despotic than his badtemper When he was miserable (as he often was, poor fellow), they only had to listen to his railings When hewas happy they had to listen to his novels All this, which was mainly mere excitability, did not seem toamount to much; it did not in the least mean that he had ceased to be a clean-living and kind-hearted and quiethonest man But there was this evil about it that he did not resist his little weakness at all; he pampered it asSkimpole pampered his And it separated him and his wife A mere silly trick of temperament did everythingthat the blackest misconduct could have done A random sensibility, started about the shuffling of papers orthe shutting of a window, ended by tearing two clean, Christian people from each other, like a blast of bigamy

or adultery

CHAPTER IX

LATER LIFE AND WORKS

I have deliberately in this book mentioned only such facts in the life of Dickens as were, I will not say

significant (for all facts must be significant, including the million facts that can never be mentioned by

anybody), but such facts as illustrated my own immediate meaning I have observed this method consistentlyand without shame because I think that we can hardly make too evident a chasm between books which profess

to be statements of all the ascertainable facts, and books which (like this one) profess only to contain a

particular opinion or a summary deducible from the facts Books like Forster's exhaustive work and othersexist, and are as accessible as St Paul's Cathedral; we have them in common as we have the facts of thephysical universe; and it seems highly desirable that the function of making an exhaustive catalogue and that

of making an individual generalisation should not be confused No catalogue, of course, can contain all thefacts even of five minutes; every catalogue, however long and learned, must be not only a bold, but, one maysay, an audacious selection Bat if a great many facts are given, the reader gains a blurred belief that all thefacts are being given In a professedly personal judgment it is therefore clearer and more honest to give only afew illustrative facts, leaving the other obtainable facts to balance them For thus it is made quite clear that thething is a sketch, an affair of a few lines

It is as well, however, to make at this point a pause sufficient to indicate the main course of the later life of thenovelist And it is best to begin with the man himself, as he appeared in those last days of popularity andpublic distinction Many are still alive who remember him in his after-dinner speeches, his lectures, and hismany public activities; as I am not one of these, I cannot correct my notions with that flash of the livingfeatures without which a description may be subtly and entirely wrong Once a man is dead, if it be onlyyesterday, the new-comer must piece him together from descriptions really as much at random as if he weredescribing Cæsar or Henry II Allowing, however, for this inevitable falsity, a figure vivid and a little

fantastic, does walk across the stage of Forster's "Life."

Dickens was of a middle size and his vivacity and relative physical insignificance probably gave rather theimpression of small size; certainly of the absence of bulk In early life he wore, even for that epoch,

extravagant clusters of brown hair, and in later years a brown moustache and a fringe of brown beard (cut like

a sort of broad and bushy imperial) sufficiently individual in shape to give him a faint air as of a foreigner Hisface had a peculiar tint or quality which is hard to describe even after one has contrived to imagine it It wasthe quality which Mrs Carlyle felt to be, as it were metallic, and compared to clear steel It was, I think, a sort

of pale glitter and animation, very much alive and yet with something deathly about it, like a corpse

galvanised by a god His face (if this was so) was curiously a counterpart of his character For the essence ofall Dickens's character was that it was at once tremulous and yet hard and sharp, just as the bright blade of asword is tremulous and yet hard and sharp He vibrated at every touch and yet he was indestructible; youcould bend him, but you could not break him Brown of hair and beard, somewhat pale of visage (especially inhis later days of excitement and ill-health), he had quite exceptionally bright and active eyes that were alwaysdarting about like brilliant birds to pick up all the tiny things of which he made more, perhaps, than anynovelist has done; for he was a sort of poetical Sherlock Holmes The mouth behind the brown beard waslarge and mobile, like the mouth of an actor; indeed he was an actor, in many things too much of an actor Inhis lectures, in later years, he could turn his strange face into any of the innumerable mad masks that were thefaces of his grotesque characters He could make his face fall suddenly into the blank inanity of Mrs Raddle'sservant, or swell, as if to twice its size, into the apoplectic energy of Mr Serjeant Buzfuz But the outline ofhis face itself, from his youth upwards, was cut quite delicate and decisive and in repose, and in its own keenway, may even have looked effeminate

The dress of the comfortable classes during the later years of Dickens was, compared with ours, somewhatslipshod and somewhat gaudy It was the time of loose pegtop trousers of an almost Turkish oddity, of largeties, of loose short jackets and of loose long whiskers Yet even this expansive period, it must be confessed,

considered Dickens a little too flashy or, as some put it, too Frenchified in his dress Such a man would wearvelvet coats and wild waistcoats that were like incredible sunsets; he would wear those old white hats of anunnecessary and startling whiteness He did not mind being seen in sensational dressing-gowns; it is said hehad his portrait painted in one of them All this is not meritorious; neither is it particularly discreditable; it is acharacteristic only, but an important one He was an absolutely independent and entirely self-respecting man.But he had none of that old lusty, half-dignified English feeling upon which Thackeray was so sensitive; Imean the desire to be regarded as a private gentleman, which means at bottom the desire to be left alone Thisagain is not a merit; it is only one of the milder aspects of aristocracy But meritorious or not, Dickens did notpossess it He had no objection to being stared at, if he were also admired He did not exactly pose in theoriental manner of Disraeli; his instincts were too clean for that; but he did pose somewhat in the Frenchmanner, of some leaders like Mirabeau and Gambetta Nor had he the dull desire to "get on" which makesmen die contented as inarticulate Under-Secretaries of State He did not desire success so much as fame, theold human glory, the applause and wonder of the people Such he was as he walked down the street in hisFrenchified clothes, probably with a slight swagger.

His private life consisted of one tragedy and ten thousand comedies By one tragedy I mean one real andrending moral tragedy the failure of his marriage He loved his children dearly, and more than one of themdied; but in sorrows like these there is no violence and above all no shame The end of life is not tragic likethe end of love And by the ten thousand comedies I mean the whole texture of his life, his letters, his

conversation, which were one incessant carnival of insane and inspired improvisation So far as he couldprevent it, he never permitted a day of his life to be ordinary There was always some prank, some impetuousproposal, some practical joke, some sudden hospitality, some sudden disappearance It is related of him (I giveone anecdote out of a hundred) that in his last visit to America, when he was already reeling as it were underthe blow that was to be mortal, he remarked quite casually to his companions that a row of painted cottageslooked exactly like the painted shops in a pantomime No sooner had the suggestion passed his lips than heleapt at the nearest doorway and in exact imitation of the clown in the harlequinade, beat conscientiously withhis fist, not on the door (for that would have burst the canvas scenery of course), but on the side of the

doorpost Having done this he lay down ceremoniously across the doorstep for the owner to fall over him if heshould come rushing out He then got up gravely and went on his way His whole life was full of such

unexpected energies, precisely like those of the pantomime clown Dickens had indeed a great and

fundamental affinity with the landscape, or rather house-scape, of the harlequinade He liked high houses, andsloping roofs, and deep areas But he would have been really happy if some good fairy of the eternal

pantomime had given him the power of flying off the roofs and pitching harmlessly down the height of thehouses and bounding out of the areas like an indiarubber ball The divine lunatic in "Nicholas Nickleby"comes nearest to his dream I really think Dickens would rather have been that one of his characters than any

of the others With what excitement he would have struggled down the chimney With what ecstatic energy hewould have hurled the cucumbers over the garden wall

His letters exhibit even more the same incessant creative force His letters are as creative as any of his literarycreation His shortest postcard is often as good as his ablest novel; each one of them is spontaneous; each one

of them is different He varies even the form and shape of the letter as far as possible; now it is in absurdFrench; now it is from one of his characters; now it is an advertisement for himself as a stray dog All of themare very funny; they are not only very funny, but they are quite as funny as his finished and published work.This is the ultimately amazing thing about Dickens; the amount there is of him He wrote, at the very least,sixteen thick important books packed full of original creation And if you had burnt them all he could havewritten sixteen more, as a man writes idle letters to his friend

In connection with this exuberant part of his nature there is another thing to be noted, if we are to make apersonal picture of him Many modern people, chiefly women, have been heard to object to the Bacchicelement in the books of Dickens, that celebration of social drinking as a supreme symbol of social living,which those books share with almost all the great literature of mankind, including the New Testament

Undoubtedly there is an abnormal amount of drinking in a page of Dickens, as there is an abnormal amount of

fighting, say, in a page of Dumas If you reckon up the beers and brandies of Mr Bob Sawyer, with the care

of an arithmetician and the deductions of a pathologist, they rise alarmingly like a rising tide at sea Dickensdid defend drink clamorously, praised it with passion, and described whole orgies of it with enormous gusto.Yet it is wonderfully typical of his prompt and impatient nature that he himself drank comparatively little Hewas the type of man who could be so eager in praising the cup that he left the cup untasted It was a part of hisactive and feverish temperament that he did not drink wine very much But it was a part of his humane

philosophy, of his religion, that he did drink wine To healthy European philosophy wine is a symbol; toEuropean religion it is a sacrament Dickens approved it because it was a great human institution, one of therites of civilisation, and this it certainly is The teetotaller who stands outside it may have perfectly clearethical reasons of his own, as a man may have who stands outside education or nationality, who refuses to go

to a University or to serve in an Army But he is neglecting one of the great social things that man has added

to nature The teetotaller has chosen a most unfortunate phrase for the drunkard when he says that the

drunkard is making a beast of himself The man who drinks ordinarily makes nothing but an ordinary man ofhimself The man who drinks excessively makes a devil of himself But nothing connected with a human andartistic thing like wine can bring one nearer to the brute life of nature The only man who is, in the exact andliteral sense of the words, making a beast of himself is the teetotaller

The tone of Dickens towards religion, though like that of most of his contemporaries, philosophically

disturbed and rather historically ignorant, had an element that was very characteristic of himself He had allthe prejudices of his time He had, for instance, that dislike of defined dogmas, which really means a

preference for unexamined dogmas He had the usual vague notion that the whole of our human past waspacked with nothing but insane Tories He had, in a word, al the old Radical ignorances which went alongwith the old Radical acuteness and courage and public spirit But this spirit tended, in almost all the otherswho held it, to a specific dislike of the Church of England; and a disposition to set the other sects against it, astruer types of inquiry, or of individualism Dickens had a definite tenderness for the Church of England Hemight have even called it a weakness for the Church of England, but he had it Something in those placidservices, something in that reticent and humane liturgy pleased him against all the tendencies of his time;pleased him in the best part of himself, his virile love of charity and peace Once, in a puff of anger at theChurch's political stupidity (which is indeed profound), he left it for a week or two and went to an UnitarianChapel; in a week or two he came back This curious and sentimental hold of the English Church upon himincreased with years In the book he was at work on when he died he describes the Minor Canon, humble,chivalrous, tender-hearted, answering with indignant simplicity the froth and platform righteousness of thesectarian philanthropist He upholds Canon Crisparkle and satirises Mr Honeythunder Almost every one ofthe other Radicals, his friends, would have upheld Mr Honeythunder and satirised Canon Crisparkle

I have mentioned this matter for a special reason It brings us back to that apparent contradiction or dualism inDickens to which, in one connection or another, I have often adverted, and which, in one shape or another,constitutes the whole crux of his character I mean the union of a general wildness approaching lunacy, with asort of secret moderation almost amounting to mediocrity Dickens was, more or less, the man I have

described sensitive, theatrical, amazing, a bit of a dandy, a bit of a buffoon Nor are such characteristics,whether weak or wild, entirely accidents or externals He had some false theatrical tendencies integral in hisnature For instance, he had one most unfortunate habit, a habit that often put him in the wrong, even when hehappened to be in the right He had an incurable habit of explaining himself This reduced his admirers to themental condition of the authentic but hitherto uncelebrated little girl who said to her mother, "I think I shouldunderstand if only you wouldn't explain." Dickens always would explain It was a part of that instinctivepublicity of his which made him at once a splendid democrat and a little too much of an actor He carried it tothe craziest lengths He actually printed, in Household Words, an apology for his own action in the matter ofhis marriage That incident alone is enough to suggest that his external offers and proposals were sometimeslike screams heard from Bedlam Yet it remains true that he had in him a central part that was pleased only bythe most decent and the most reposeful rites, by things of which the Anglican Prayer-book is very typical It iscertainly true that he was often extravagant It is most certainly equally true that he detested and despisedextravagance

The best explanation can be found in his literary genius His literary genius consisted in a contradictorycapacity at once to entertain and to deride very ridiculous ideas If he is a buffoon, he is laughing at

buffoonery His books were in some ways the wildest on the face of the world Rabelais did not introduce intoPaphlagonia or the Kingdom of the Coqcigrues satiric figures more frantic and misshapen than Dickens made

to walk about the Strand and Lincoln's Inn But for all that, you come, in the core of him, on a sudden

quietude and good sense Such, I think, was the core of Rabelais, such were all the far-stretching and violentsatirists This is a point essential to Dickens, though very little comprehended in our current tone of thought.Dickens was an immoderate jester, but a moderate thinker He was an immoderate jester because he was amoderate thinker What we moderns call the wildness of his imagination was actually created by what wemoderns call the tameness of his thought I mean that he felt the full insanity of all extreme tendencies,

because he was himself so sane; he felt eccentricities, because he was in the centre We are always, in thesedays, asking our violent prophets to write violent satires; but violent prophets can never possibly write violentsatires In order to write satire like that of Rabelais satire that juggles with the stars and kicks the world aboutlike a football it is necessary to be one's self temperate, and even mild A modern man like Nietzsche, amodern man like Gorky, a modern man like d'Annunzio, could not possibly write real and riotous satire Theyare themselves too much on the borderlands They could not be a success as caricaturists, for they are already

a great success as caricatures

I have mentioned his religious preference merely as an instance of this interior moderation To say, as somehave done, that he attacked Nonconformity is quite a false way of putting it It is clean across the whole trend

of the man and his time to suppose that he could have felt bitterness against any theological body as a

theological body; but anything like religious extravagance, whether Protestant or Catholic, moved him to anextravagance of satire And he flung himself into the drunken energy of Stiggins, he piled up to the stars the

"verbose flights of stairs" of Mr Chadband, exactly because his own conception of religion was the quiet andimpersonal Morning Prayer It is typical of him that he had a peculiar hatred for speeches at the grave-side

An even clearer case of what I mean can be found in his political attitude He seemed to some an almostanarchic satirist He made equal fun of the system which reformers made war on, and of the instruments onwhich reformers relied He made no secret of his feeling that the average English premier was an accidentalass In two superb sentences he summed up and swept away the whole British constitution: "England, for thelast week, has been in an awful state Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn't come in, andthere being no people in England to speak of except Coodle and Doodle, the country has been without agovernment." He lumped all cabinets and all government offices together, and made the same game of themall He created his most staggering humbugs, his most adorable and incredible idiots, and set them in thehighest thrones of our national system To many moderate and progressive people, such a satirist seemed to beinsulting heaven and earth, ready to wreck society for some mad alternative, prepared to pull down St Paul's,and on its ruins erect a gory guillotine Yet as a matter of fact, this apparent wildness of his came from hisbeing, if anything, a very moderate politician It came, not at all from fanaticism, but from a rather rationaldetachment He had the sense to see that the British Constitution was not democracy, but the British

Constitution It was an artificial system like any other, good in some ways, bad in others His satire of itsounded wild to those that worshipped it; but his satire of it arose not from his having any wild enthusiasmagainst it, but simply from his not having, like every one else, a wild enthusiasm for it Alone, as far as Iknow, among all the great Englishmen of that age, he realised the thing that Frenchmen and Irishmen

understand I mean the fact that popular government is one thing, and representative government another Herealised that representative government has many minor disadvantages, one of them being that it is neverrepresentative He speaks of his "hope to have made every man in England feel something of the contempt forthe House of Commons that I have." He says also these two things, both of which are wonderfully penetrating

as coming from a good Radical in 1855, for they contain a perfect statement of the peril in which we nowstand, and which may, if it please God, sting us into avoiding the long vista at the end of which one sees soclosely the dignity and the decay of Venice

"I am hourly strengthened," he says, "in my old belief, that our political aristocracy and our tuft-hunting are